Sam Fleischacker

Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

This paper offers a thorough review of the uses of Kant in Dialektik der Aufklä-
rung ¹, and argues that the authors are more Kantian than is generally recog-
nized. A few caveats are in order: First, given the difficulty of the Dialektik,
and the complexity of the context in which it was written, I am reluctant to
offer any interpretation of it with full confidence. I intend the suggestions
given here², rather, in tentative vein, as a spark to discussion rather than a set
of firm conclusions. Horkheimer and Adorno took their book to be a set of “frag-
ments” or “samples” of philosophy³, rather than a fully worked-out system. This
paper, we might say, is a fragment on those fragments. Second, although I realize
that Horkheimer and Adorno declare that their voices are thoroughly intertwined
throughout Dialektik der Aufklärung, that they “both [felt] responsible for every
sentence” of the book⁴, what I will say probably pertains mostly to Horkheimer,
not Adorno. Kant is extensively discussed only in the chapters that are thought to
have been written primarily by Horkheimer – the opening chapter, the excursus
on Juliette, and the chapter on anti-Semitism – and it was Horkheimer who had
written both a dissertation and a Habilitationsschrift on Kant; what the Dialektik
says about Kant’s conception of reasoning also has strong resonances with what
Horkheimer said on that subject in other writings.⁵ I suspect that the two agreed
that Horkheimer was the resident expert on Kant. Finally, I take seriously the re-
peated indication of both writers that they were trying to save enlightenment
from some of its own pathologies, not to reject it. They declare in the 1944 pre-
face that their “critique of enlightenment […] is intended to prepare a positive
concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in blind dom-
ination”⁶, acknowledge that “freedom in society is inseparable from enlighten-
ment thinking”⁷, and end the book – at least if we take the “Notes and Sketches”

 All references will be given, first to the English translation by E. Jephcott, Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, ed. G. Schmid Noerr (here: “DE”), then to the German edition in vol. 5 of Max Hork-
heimer, Gesammelte Schriften (here: “DA”).
 See also Fleischacker, What is Enlightenment?, 102– 107.
 DE xiv/DA 16: “Fragmente” / “Proben”.
 DE xi/DA 13; see also “Editor’s Afterword” to the Noerr/Jephcott edition, 219 – 220.
 See especially his Eclipse of Reason, and Critique of Instrumental Reason.
 DE xviii/DA 21: “Die dabei an Aufklärung geübte Kritik soll einen positiven Begriff von ihr vor-
bereiten, der sie aus ihrer Verstrickung in blinder Herrschaft löst.”
 DE xvi/DA 18: “Wir hegen keinen Zweifel […], daß die Freiheit in der Gesellschaft vom aufklä-
renden Denken unabtrennbar ist.”

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124 Sam Fleischacker

to be a sort of appendix, rather than part of the main text – by expressing the
hope that “Enlightenment […] [can] break through the limits of enlightenment.”⁸
I think this modestly hopeful strain, and real if qualified praise for enlighten-
ment – often missed or underplayed in the reception of the book – is tied to
an attachment that Horkheimer, at least, retained to Kant. In my view, Horkhei-
mer saw himself as criticizing Kant from within, not attempting to overturn
Kant’s philosophical project.⁹ In an attempt to make this point clear, I may per-
haps over-emphasize the positive picture of enlightenment in the Dialektik ¹⁰; my
excuse for that is that a bit of exaggeration may be necessary to counteract the
long tradition that has taken the book to be an unreserved attack on both Kant
and the enlightenment.

1
To begin in earnest, now, here is a catalogue of the main ways in which Kant gets
used or discussed in the Dialektik der Aufklärung. In the first place, the authors
rely almost exclusively on Kant’s first Critique for their epistemology.¹¹ A “con-
cept,” they say right at the beginning, is “usually defined as the unity of the fea-
tures of what it subsumes [Merkmalseinheit des darunter Befaßten].”¹² That is of
course Kant’s definition of a concept.¹³ To be sure, the authors’ Kantianism here

 DE 172/DA 238: “Die ihrer selbst mächtige, zur Gewalt werdende Aufklärung selbst vermöchte
die Grenzen der Aufklärung zu durchbrechen.”
 Heidegger, following a remark of Kant’s own on Plato (Critique of Practical Reason, B 370/A
314), says that “to understand Kant properly means to understand him better than he under-
stood himself.” – Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, 2. I
think Horkheimer and Adorno agreed with this, and that they saw Dialektik der Aufklärung as
having understood Kantian reason better than Kant did himself.
 That may also be an effect of my own continued attachment to both the idea of enlighten-
ment and the period associated with that idea.
 Sometimes this comes out as they use Kant to explicate a conception of knowledge – mod-
ern, positivistic science – that they oppose: but even here, it is notable that Kant is for them the
great framer of the terms of modern science.
 DE 11/DA 38.
 See for instance Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 68/B 93 (“concepts [rest] on functions[, by
which] I understand the unity of the act of ordering different representations under a common
one [die Einheit der Handlung, verschiedene Vorstellungen unter einer gemeinschaftlichen zu
ordnen]”), and B 137 (“an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition
is united [Objekt aber ist das, in dessen Begriff das Mannigfaltige einer gegebenen Anschauung
vereinigt ist]”). Future references to the first Critique will be incorporated into the text with A
and/or B paginations.

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 125

is qualified by its insertion into a Hegelian context. As a whole, the sentence I

have just quoted reads: “The concept, usually defined as the unity of the features
of what it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a product of dialectical thinking, in
which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.”¹⁴ This dialectical
setting allows the authors to define the concept of “enlightenment,” a few sen-
tences further down, as always already “mythical fear,” while “myth” always al-
ready contains enlightenment – a central move, arguably the central move, of the
book as a whole. Similarly dialectical analyses of Kantian morality, the “claim of
art [Anspruch der Kunst]”¹⁵, and anti-Semitism, will follow.
Yet I submit that the authors rely on Kant’s definition of a concept through-
out these dialectical analyses. They use the phrase “recognition in a concept [Re-
kognition im Begriff]”, exactly as Kant does in the A version of the Transcenden-
tal Deduction (A 103), to describe the process of picking out what is the same in a
group of disparate particulars.¹⁶ They also endorse Kant’s claim that concepts
precede and shape what we sense¹⁷, as well as Kant’s account of reason as laying
down rules for the unification of concepts: “Reason’s rules are instructions for a
hierarchical order of concepts.”¹⁸ The transcendental ego is the apex of reason,
they say, and reason is a legislator that unifies, and thus controls, the lower level
unifying structures – the concepts – of the understanding.¹⁹ This is all straight
Kant, bringing together Transcendental Deduction B (133n) with the beginning
and end of the Transcendental Dialectic, and the appendix on the regulative
use of reason.²⁰
Horkheimer and Adorno also follow Kant epistemologically in stressing the
need to figure out how concepts apply to empirical intuitions, and the difficulties

 DE 11/DA 38: “Der Begriff, den man gern als Merkmalseinheit des darunter Befaßten defi-
niert, war vielmehr seit Beginn das Produkt dialektischen Denkens, worin jedes stets nur ist,
was es ist, indem es zu dem wird, was es nicht ist.”
 DE 103/DA 155.
 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 103; DE 148 – 149/DA 211; see also DE 205/DA 278 – 279. There
are other references to the Transcendental Deductions, in both its A and its B versions (DE 20/DA
48, which quotes B 131 (“that […] ‘I think’, which must accompany all my conceptions”); DE 155/
DA 219, which cites A 106 – 107, probably, although perhaps B 135). At DE 65/DA 106, the authors
also mention the difficulties, raised by the Deduction as well as the Paralogisms, of reconciling
the transcendental and the empirical self.
 DE 65/DA 107; see also DE 31/DA 62.
 DE 63/DA 104: “Ihre Vorschriften sind die Anweisungen zum hierarchischen Aufbau der Be-
griffe.”; see also DE 23/DA 48.
 “The self […] was sublimated into a transcendental or logical subject, [which] formed the
reference point of reason, the legislating authority of action” (DE 22/DA 52).
 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 299/B 355-A 309/B 366 (Dialectic) and A 642– 668/B 670 –
696 (the appendix), which they quote copiously on DE 63 – 64/DA 104– 105.

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126 Sam Fleischacker

in doing that. For Kant, concepts are rules for organizing particulars, but Kant
anticipated Wittgenstein in noting that no rule can tell us how to apply a rule:
“If [logic] sought to give general instructions [as to] how we are to subsume [par-
ticulars] under […] rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does
not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule.”²¹ Conse-
quently, says Kant, only judgment – “a peculiar talent,” as he calls it, or “the
quality of so-called mother-wit [des sogenannten Mutterwitzes]”²² – can apply
rules, although there are models which he calls “schemata” that can guide us
in this process. The Schematism of the first Critique sketches how the process
works on the transcendental level, but Kant also confesses in the middle of it
– notoriously — that schematism is “an art concealed in the depths of the
human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow
us to discover.”²³ Horkheimer and Adorno quote all of this, repeatedly emphasiz-
ing the obscurity of Kant’s schematism.²⁴ They go on to use the term “schema”
throughout their accounts of mass culture and anti-Semitism, although they de-
velop their own, sociological view of how schemata operate. The “schema” of a
film or a popular song is determined by “the culture industry”²⁵; the schemata of
the good German man, and of the evil Jew, that enabled fascism to take power
were produced by a particular socio-economic system.²⁶ I will return to the Dia-
lektik’s attention to the schematism later – it is one of the most interesting ways
in which Kant gets used in the book – but it is worth noting at the moment that
in their emphasis on the schematism, Horkheimer and Adorno show an affinity
with Heidegger’s way of reading Kant²⁷, and defy the accepted wisdom of other
Kantians in their day. The appeal to “an art concealed in the human soul” in the
Schematism was an embarrassment to most Kantians – a moment of psycholo-
gism, a hint of mysticism, or a sign that Kant didn’t know how to solve the prob-
lem he had set for himself – and the neo-Kantians had dismissed that section of

 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 133/B 172.

 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 133/B 172.
 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 141/B 181: “Dieser Schematismus unseres Verstandes […] ist
eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele, deren wahre Handgriffe wir der
Natur schwerlich jemals abraten, und sie unverdeckt vor Augen legen werden”.
 DE 64/DA 105, DE 98/DA 149, DE 154/DA 217– 218. All three of these passages mention the
“secret” nature of the schematism, and the third of them quotes the passage describing it as
“concealed in the depths of the human soul”.
 DE 98 – 99, 100 – 101/DA 149, 152– 153.
 DE 157– 161/DA 221– 4.
 Heidegger stressed this aspect of Kant in his so-called “Kant book”, Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik).

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 127

the book.²⁸ Heidegger’s fondness for the schematism was due precisely to his
sense that it showed a gap in the system into which he could insert a different,
pre-rational account of how human beings connect to the empirical world; Hork-
heimer and Adorno’s interest in it has, I believe, similar roots.
To get back, however, to our catalogue: In addition to drawing epistemolog-
ical elements from Kant, the authors, famously, attack Kant’s moral philosophy.
Kant claims that reason has a moral as well as an instrumental use, they ac-
knowledge, which enables us to express our respect for one another, but he
fails to defend this claim, they believe, and his insistence that practical deliber-
ation must be grounded in reason paves the way for a pure amoralism, which
can justify the projects of a de Sade just as much as it can a “kingdom of
ends [Reich der Zwecke]”. To make these claims, the authors cite elements of
the Groundwork, the second Critique, the Metaphysics of Morals and the Observa-
tions on the Beautiful and the Sublime.
The third Kantian source of interest to Horkheimer and Adorno is “What is
Enlightenment?”. They quote it twice²⁹ and allude to its emphasis on coming out
of Unmündigkeit on at least two other occasions.³⁰ One might actually have ex-
pected a greater discussion of this text in a book on the problems of enlighten-
ment, but its themes do not bring up what really worries the authors about en-
lightenment. They seem to agree with Kant both that enlightenment is a maturity
of some sort, and that that is a good thing: they are themselves calling, after all,
for people to wake up from the illusions that keep them from recognizing the
great harms of industrialization, propaganda, consumer culture, and the like.
So I think they don’t conceive Kant’s essay on enlightenment as a target of
their critique; on the contrary, it helps to set the terms in which they launch
that critique.
Finally, there are occasional allusions to or quotes from the Critique of Judg-
ment. Horkheimer had written both his dissertation and Habilitationsschrift on
this text, and he cites it in connection with the problem of how concepts can
be brought together with particulars, at the opening of Excursus II. He also
uses the phrase “purposiveness without purpose [Zweckmäßigkeit ohne
Zweck]” later in the chapter³¹ and it appears as well in the chapter on the culture

 They preferred either to ground science on a pure logic that did without intuitions (this was
the approach of the Marburg school) or to posit an unbridgeable gap between conceptual con-
tent and what is given to us in perception (this was the approach of the Southwest school). For
discussion, see Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, 31– 37.
 DE 63, 68/DA 104, 109.
 DE 65, 90/DA 106, 138.
 DE 69/DA 112.

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128 Sam Fleischacker

industry.³² In both of these latter cases, the phrase suggests an absence of real
purpose, a directedness towards purpose without a sense of what purposes ac-
tually look like, which the authors associate with bourgeois culture and modern
science. Needless to say, this is not what Kant himself had meant by the phrase:
for Kant, it marked the state in which we discern beauty, which is precisely a
state in which we see objects as if they had an internal purpose.

2
I hope this catalogue of the uses of Kant in Dialektik der Aufklärung gives a sense
of how thorough and deep the authors’ knowledge of Kant was, and how much
they rely on him to set up their views, even if they also sharply criticize him. I
turn now to their central and most famous critique of him, which I will set within
this broader context.
Horkheimer and Adorno allege that there is and can be no content to Kant’s
moral system. They say that reason for Kant is and must be wholly instrumental,
helping us fulfill purposes without telling us anything about the purposes we
ought to have. Kantian reason can thus justify the capricious brutality of a de
Sade; in a famous stretch of the book, the authors juxtapose a discussion of
Kant with quotations from de Sade and Nietzsche (whom they treat as inter-
changeable), and conclude that these “dark writers of the bourgeoisie” merely
showed more honestly than Kant where enlightenment reason leads: “They
did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argu-
ment against murder,” as Kant does, “but proclaimed it from the rooftops.”³³
Now one reaction to this critique, from anyone who knows Kant well, is that
it signifies a complete misunderstanding of Kant’s writings. “Only the hastiest
reading of Kant’s work could miss his attack on instrumental conceptions of rea-
son”, writes Susan Neiman³⁴; that was also my own first reaction to this stretch of
Dialektik der Aufklärung. Kant’s argument for the second version of the categori-
cal imperative, in the Groundwork, is devoted precisely to showing us that reason
sets us an end – our only absolute end – and the introduction to the second Cri-
tique tells us that that book is entirely devoted to showing us that there is a pure
practical reason, which has its own internal ends, and not just the “empirically

 DE 127– 128/DA 185.

 DE 93/DA 142: “Die Unmöglichkeit, aus der Vernunft ein grundsätzliches Argument gegen
den Mord vorzubringen, nicht vertuscht, sondern in alle Welt geschrieen zu haben, hat den
Haß entzündet, mit dem gerade die Progressiven Sade und Nietzsche heute noch verfolgen.”
 Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 193.

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 129

conditioned” reason that helps us satisfy our desires.³⁵ As Neiman says, an at-
tack on instrumental reason is central to Kant’s moral philosophy.
But it is not true that Horkheimer and Adorno simply miss this aspect of
Kant.³⁶ Instead they use Kant’s own terms to reject Kant’s argument for the exis-
tence of a pure practical reason. Kant’s “attempt to derive the duty of mutual re-
spect from a law of reason,” they say, “although more cautious than any other
such undertaking in Western philosophy, has no support within the Critique.”³⁷
A bit later³⁸, they note that Kant declares the existence of pure practical reason to
be “a fact of reason [Faktum der Vernunft]”, but say that “despite [Kant’s] assur-
ances”, the phenomenon he describes can only be “a psychological fact of na-
ture”, not something produced by reason. They add, rightly of course, that
“facts count for nothing where they do not exist”³⁹, and treat Kant’s attempt
to defend an intrinsically moral reason, from this point onwards, as a wholly in-
adequate bulwark against the immoralism of a de Sade.
Now it has to be said that Horkheimer and Adorno are a bit careless in their
identification of what Kant calls “the fact of reason”. Kant is not altogether clear
about what that phrase denotes, and there is debate among commentators over
whether it should be identified with our consciousness of the moral law, the
moral law itself, our autonomy, or our consciousness of freedom⁴⁰, but he

 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, AA, vol. 5, 15. Translations from the Critique of Practical
Reason will be marked as CPrR and will come from the translation by L. W. Beck for Macmillan
(third edition, 1993).
 The catalogue of their uses of Kant that I ran through should indicate that they are unlikely
to have made such a clumsy mistake, as does Horkheimer’s long scholarly immersion in Kant.
 DE 67/DA 108: “Kants […] Unterfangen, die Pflicht der gegenseitigen Achtung, wenn auch
noch vorsichtiger als die ganze westliche Philosophie, aus einem Gesetz der Vernunft abzulei-
ten, findet keine Stütze in der Kritik.” It’s not entirely clear which “Critique” they have in
mind, but context, and their general interests, suggests the first Critique: see the end of this
same paragraph on DE 68/DA 109, and, a bit earlier, DE 65/DA 106.
 DE 74/DA 117.
 DE 74/DA 117: “Kant hatte freilich das moralische Gesetz in mir schon so lang von jedem he-
teronomen Glauben gereinigt, bis der Respekt entgegen Kants Versicherungen bloß noch eine
psychologische Naturtatsache war, wie der gestirnte Himmel über mir eine physikalische.”
They allude here to the conclusion of the second Critique, in which Kant speaks of “the starry
skies above [him] and the moral law within [him]” as the two things that most inspire admira-
tion and reverence (CrPrR, AA, vol. 5, 161).
 On this issue, see Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, chapter 13. Allison thinks – and I
agree – that on balance the texts indicate that the “fact of reason” is our consciousness of
the moral law. See, especially CPrR, AA, vol. 5, 29 – 30, and 31– 32. But at AA, vol. 5, 42, Kant
identifies the fact with “autonomy,” and says it is “identical with” our consciousness of free-
dom – having denied, at vol. 5, 31, that consciousness of freedom is given to us, and implied

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130 Sam Fleischacker

never identifies it with “respect.”⁴¹ That said, Kant does see our consciousness of
the moral law – the best candidate for what he means by “the fact of reason” –
as entailing “respect [Achtung]”.⁴² And Kant’s arguments both that reason can
entail respect and that there is a fact of reason are riddled with problems. The
idea that reason can give rise to a feeling seems to violate Kant’s own strictures
against noumenal/phenomenal causality, and the idea of something that is “not
an empirical fact, but […] [a] fact of pure reason”⁴³ and “of which we are a priori
conscious”⁴⁴, seems to defy everything that Kant elsewhere says about facts.
Facts, in the Critique of Pure Reason, are empirical states of affairs. We need in-
tuition as well as concepts to cognize them – we are never “a priori conscious” of
them – and we must place them within a unified experience bound together by
the categories: such that, for one thing, each fact must have another fact as its
cause. So it would seem impossible for there to be any fact that expressed or en-
tailed free will, as the fact of reason does in the second Critique. And any feeling I
have, including respect, as well as any state of consciousness I have, including
the state in which I am aware of the moral law, can only be a psychological fact
about me, with an empirical cause.
Kant’s defenders may have responses to these points⁴⁵, but it should be clear
that Horkheimer and Adorno are on strong ground when they say that Kant’s ac-

that the fact of reason is something different from the consciousness of freedom – and at vol. 5,
47 and 55, he identifies it with the moral law (in both of the latter cases, however, context sug-
gests that he is really talking about our consciousness of the moral law).
 Dieter Henrich apparently regards the fact of reason as “inseparable” from respect, but even
if he is right about that, respect will be entailed by the fact of reason rather than constituting it.
See his “Das Problem der Grundlegung der Ethik bei Kant und im spekulativen Idealismus”, 282,
n2.
 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, AA, vol. 4, 401n, 435 – 436, 460 and CPrR, AA,
vol. 5, 74– 76, 79, 92.
 CPrR, AA, vol. 5, 31: “Doch muß man, um dieses Gesetz ohne Mißdeutung als gegeben an-
zusehen, wohl bemerken: daß es kein empirisches, sondern das einzige Factum der reinen Ver-
nunft sei”.
 CPrR, AA, vol. 5, 47: “das moralische [ist] Gesetz gleichsam als ein Factum der reinen Ver-
nunft, dessen wir uns a priori bewußt sind und welches apodiktisch gewiß ist, gegeben”.
 Kant’s own arguments to the effect that “respect” – and moral feeling more generally – must
be understood as an effect of reason upon me, work a lot better if one already accepts the idea of
a moral reason, that can act independently of empirical incentives. Then one can say he is sim-
ply providing a hermeneutic key to the understanding of certain empirical phenomena, given a
view of reason as active that he has established elsewhere. This procedure seems quite plausi-
ble – throughout Kant’s moral writings, and especially in the Religion, he offers astute and help-
ful ways of interpreting empirical facts in a rational (moral) light – but it cannot, of course,

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 131

counts of respect, and of the fact of reason, “[have] no support within the Cri-
tique.”⁴⁶ So their rejection of Kant’s attempt to establish a moral, non-instrumen-
tal reason is not arbitrary or thoughtless – not a reflection of a reliance on “at-
mosphere” rather than argument, as Neiman would have it. They also seem to
wish that Kant had been more successful in this endeavor. They say, after all,
that his attempt to do this was “more cautious than any other such undertaking
in Western philosophy”, and indicate that they share his moral ideals. At several
points in the Kant and de Sade chapter, they speak of the “secret utopia harbored
within the concept of reason”,⁴⁷ at one point describing it as “the community of
free individuals”⁴⁸ – which for all its Marxist lineage also sounds very close to
Kant’s kingdom of ends – and at another identifying it with Kant’s concept of
reason.⁴⁹ Moreover, the commitment to freedom that they themselves show
throughout suggests that they share the ideal of a “community of free individu-
als.” The fact that they describe that community as a “utopia” also suggests that
it is an ideal for them: although an ideal that may not be realizable (a severe
criticism for Marxists, of course). Kant, at any rate, by speaking of a “fact of rea-
son” that he had no grounds to call a fact, had done nothing to show that this
utopia was realizable. That leaves his vindication of reason open to becoming a
vindication of instrumental reason, as in fact it has become, they think, in our
mechanized, capitalist society.
The other aspects of Horkheimer and Adorno’s use of Kant buttress this read-
ing. In the first place, the demonstration that the function of reason in the first
Critique is centrally to organize the rest of how we think fits in perfectly with
their general story about reason in modern life. “Reason is the agency of calcu-
lating thought,” they say, right after an explicit allusion to the first Critique, add-
ing that “the true nature of the schematism […] turns out, in current science, to
be the interest of industrial society.” Concepts, obliterating differences in favor of
“recognition of the same,” help us turn everything, including ourselves, into “a

ground the claim that reason is practical, or that that reason has manifestations in the empirical
world.
 As mentioned in note 16 above, it’s not entirely clear which “Critique” they have in mind
here. Context would suggest the first Critique, not the second – that’s what they’ve been talking
about for the past several pages and that’s the book in which Kant discusses “facts.” Moreover,
the second Critique doesn’t even purport to offer support for a “fact of reason”: it instead takes
that fact for granted. Perhaps by “the Critique” they mean the entire Critical project, not a par-
ticular one of its volumes.
 DE 66/DA 107: “geheime Utopie im Begriff der Vernunft”; see also DE 69/DA 112, DE 71/DA
114, DE 73/DA 116, DE 93/DA 142.
 DE 71/DA 114: “Idee des Vereins freier Menschen”.
 DE 93/DA 142.

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132 Sam Fleischacker

repeatable, replaceable process”.⁵⁰ And they are brought together by reason into
an ego that masters nature for the sake of nothing more than mastery itself.⁵¹
Given the failure of Kant’s argument for a moral reason, the calculating, organ-
izing, and regulating role that reason plays in Kant’s epistemology are now
brought to bear to suggest that this, and not the representation of human beings
as ends in themselves, is the real function of reason for Kant.
In the second place, given the failure of Kant’s moral arguments, the phrase
“purposiveness without purpose” comes to take on a meaning other than the one
Kant intended for it. Horkheimer and Adorno use it to stress the resolutely un-
teleological, even anti-teleological, nature of Kantian reasoning, the inability
of reason as Kant construes it to find purposes for what it does. Since reason
has become empty process, the phrase that Kant had used for what seems like
an end in nature – for things we see as worth experiencing in themselves – be-
comes for them a marker of how hopeless Kant’s attempts were to locate any-
thing truly end-like, anything intrinsically worthwhile, in nature. Again, it’s
worth stressing that Horkheimer and Adorno are not ignoring what Kant says,
but using Kant’s language and ideas to make anti-Kantian points. Their critique
remains an internal one, locating the problems in Kant with Kant’s own tools.

3
Where, now, is the optimistic strand in the book that I promised to bring out, the
hints that there is or may be some way of salvaging Kantian reason, and the en-
lightenment it represents, “from its entanglement in blind domination”? It must
be confessed that these hints, even if they exist, are muted; the Dialektik is a
book primarily of dark pessimism, written at the peak of the murderous and to-
talitarian horrors of the twentieth century, and intended far more to shake up
any blithe confidence that advocates of an enlightened politics may have had
in the possibility that a freer or more decent world would soon emerge than to
offer comfort in this regard. But I think Horkheimer and Adorno do give us at
least three small indications that the fate of reason is not quite as bleak as it
may seem.

 DE 65/DA 107: “Die wahre Natur des Schematismus, der Allgemeines und Besonderes, Be-
griff und Einzelfall von außen aufeinander abstimmt, erweist sich schließlich in der aktuellen
Wissenschaft als das Interesse der Industriegesellschaft. Das Sein wird unter dem Aspekt der
Verarbeitung und Verwaltung angeschaut. Alles wird zum wiederholbaren, ersetzbaren Prozeß,
zum bloßen Beispiel für die begrifflichen Modelle des Systems”.
 DE 65, 68 – 69/DA 107, 109 – 111; see also DE 28 – 31/DA 59 – 63.

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 133

First, in placing a great deal of the harm of the consumerist and domineer-
ing tendencies that make for a dehumanized capitalism, a mindless culture in-
dustry, and a paranoiac fascism, in the “schemata” by which concepts are ap-
plied, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that we should be worried above all
about certain sub-rational forces, not reason itself. Schemata, for both Kant
and Horkheimer/Adorno, are the means by which rationality gets applied to
the empirical world. Our authors differ from Kant on this subject just in that,
for Kant, schematism is “a secret mechanism within the psyche”, while for
them “that secret has now been unraveled” and it turns out to be a social mech-
anism, not a psychical one.⁵² The social forces that construct schemata under
capitalism breed a shallow and egoistic culture, and the social forces that con-
struct schemata under fascism make for a rigidity, and a puritanical hypocrisy,
that manifests itself in brutal anti-Semitism, among other things. But if society
can construct oppressive and dehumanizing schemata, presumably society can
also construct liberating and humanitarian schemata. The first step in that proc-
ess, however, is revolution, radical social change, not a change in theory alone.
The point then is that we need radical social change even in order to think differ-
ently: we cannot rely, even for the adequacy of our thinking, on reason alone.
That is of course an unsurprising conclusion for two Marxists – even Marxists
who had been disillusioned by the Communist revolutions of their day.
Second, the authors indicate strongly that reason needs to be supplemented
by a respectful – humble – attitude towards nature. One of the great evils they
see in modern scientific reason is its aspiration toward mastery over nature:
“What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate
both it and human beings,” they say.⁵³ Nature is “stripped of its qualities”⁵⁴
and becomes merely quantifiable: something to be known purely mathematical-

 DE 98/DA 149: “In der Seele sollte ein geheimer Mechanismus wirken, der die unmittelbaren
Daten bereits so präpariert, daß sie ins System der Reinen Vernunft hineinpassen. Das Geheim-
nis ist heute enträtselt.” An audience member at the conference where I first presented this argu-
ment noted that the passage on 98/149 in which the authors say that “[t]hat secret has now been
unraveled”, is pervasively ironic, and that the authors are out to deny that the “active contribu-
tion” that Kantian schematism calls on us to make to our knowledge is possible under capital-
ism. All this is true, but the irony is directed at the workings of capitalism, not Kant’s epistemol-
ogy (which they endorse without irony, in their other mentions of it), and their polemic makes
sense only on the presupposition that we should all be able to contribute actively to our cognitive
commitments. And that last presupposition makes sense only if we can do this – if perhaps only
when the culture industry, and the capitalist structure out of which it arises, is overthrown.
 DE 2/DA 26. Similarly DE 6/DA 31: “The man of science knows things to the extent that [he
can manipulate them]”.
 DE 6/DA 32.

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134 Sam Fleischacker

ly – purely as a matter of “numbers”.⁵⁵ And the “self” that engages in this sort of
science is interested only in “subjugat[ing] the world”; it “equate[s] truth” with
classifying things under concepts, so that it can manipulate them, rather than
trying “really [to] apprehend the object.”⁵⁶ This pursuit is driven by a fear of
the unknown, and it cannot tolerate the new or the distinctive: among other
things, it obliterates everything distinctive in human nature: everything that
makes us individuals.⁵⁷ All of these problems are characteristic of Kant’s concep-
tion of knowledge, for Horkheimer and Adorno.
In this aspect of their critique, there are strong affinities between their read-
ing of Kant and Heidegger’s. Heidegger too argues, in one of his lecture courses
on Kant, that for the Critique of Pure Reason the real must be the mathematical,
that only number (“intensive magnitude”) allows things to stand as objects in
contradistinction to the self.⁵⁸ Mathematization enables us to distance ourselves
from things, to keep them apart from ourselves. As a result, we take a mathema-
tized science to give us things as they really are, to present the world “objective-
ly,” without presuppositions – even though this very mathematized science is re-
plete with such presuppositions:

Today the given for experimental atomic physics is only a manifold of light spots and
streaks on a photographic plate. No fewer presuppositions are necessary for the interpreta-
tion of this given than for the interpretation of a poem. It is only the solidity and tangibility
of the measuring apparatus [Meßapparatur] which gives rise to the appearance that this in-
terpretation stands on firmer ground than the allegedly subjective basis of the interpreta-
tions of [poets].⁵⁹

 DE 4/DA 29; see also DE 13/DA 40.

 DE 10/DA 36: “Das Selbst, das die Ordnung und Unterordnung an der Unterwerfung der Welt
lernte, hat bald Wahrheit überhaupt mit dem disponierenden Denken ineinsgesetzt, ohne des-
sen feste Unterscheidungen sie nicht bestehen kann. Es hat mit dem mimetischen Zauber die
Erkenntnis tabuiert, die den Gegenstand wirklich trifft.”
 See DE 2/DA 26, DE 23/DA 52: “[T]he transcendental subject of knowledge, the last reminder
of subjectivity, is itself seemingly abolished and replaced by the operations of the automatic
mechanisms of order” / “Schließlich wird dem Schein nach das transzendentale Subjekt der Er-
kenntnis als die letzte Erinnerung an Subjektivität selbst noch abgeschafft und durch die desto
reibungslosere Arbeit der selbsttätigen Ordnungsmechanismen ersetzt.”
 Heidegger, What is a Thing?, 184, 201– 224, esp. 218 – 219.
 Heidegger, What is a Thing?, 184 (“Heute ist das Gegebene für die experimentelle Atomphy-
sik nur eine Mannigfaltigkeit von Lichtflecken und Strichen auf der photographischen Platte.
Dieses Gegebene auszulegen, bedarf es nicht weniger Voraussetzungen als bei der Auslegung
eines Gedichtes. Es ist nur die Festigkeit und Greifbarkeit der Meßapparatur, was den Anschein
erweckt, diese Auslegung stünde auf einem festeren Boden als die angeblich nur auf subjektiven
Einfällen beruhenden Auslegungen der Dichter in den Geisteswissenschaften.”; Die Frage nach
dem Ding, 212). It’s worth comparing this passage with 51– 4, earlier in the book, in which Hei-

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 135

As the end of this passage indicates, Heidegger takes art to be the main alterna-
tive to this relentlessly mathematizing approach to nature, drawing the contrast
by way of two paintings by van Gogh, “Crows over Wheatfields” and “Chair with
Pipe”: “Fortunately, there still exists […] the coloring and shine of things them-
selves, the green of the leaf and the yellow of the grain field, the black of the
crow and the gray of the sky. […] The question arises as to what more truly is,
that crude chair with the tobacco pipe depicted in the painting by van Gogh,
or the waves which correspond to the colors used in the painting […]?” ⁶⁰
The last question is rhetorical, or at least intended to shake up any impulse
we might have to suppose that of course the light-waves are more real. And the
target of this critique of the assumption that reality consists just in what a math-
ematized science measures is Kant. Kant, says Heidegger, “remains at the level of
[the mathematical] starting point. Like the tradition before and after him, he
skips that sphere of things in which we know ourselves immediately at home,
i. e., things as the artist depicts them for us, such as van Gogh’s simple chair
with the tobacco pipe which was just put down or forgotten there.” ⁶¹
Heidegger developed these points, famously, with reference to a different
van Gogh painting in his contemporaneous Origin of the Work of Art. ⁶² There,
art makes room for the new and the distinctive – for an approach to nature
that does not merely try to master it, that uses it without using it up.⁶³

degger argues that the incompetent interpretation of poetry can have vast, if hard to see, social
consequences.
 Heidegger, What is a Thing?, 210 – 211 (“Zum Glück gibt es aber vorerst noch […] die Farbig-
keit und das Leuchten der Dinge selbst, das Grün des Blattes und das Gelb des Kornfelds, das
Schwarz der Krähe und das Grau des Himmels. […] Die Frage erhebt sich: Was ist seiender, jener
grobe Stuhl mit der Tabakpfeife, den das Gemälde van Goghs zeigt, oder die Lichtwellen, die den
dabei verwendeten Farben entsprechen”; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 213).
 Heidegger, What is a Thing, 211 (“In der Ebene dieses Ansatzes hält sich auch Kant; er hat,
wie die Überlieferung vor ihm und nach ihm, jenen Bereich der Dinge von vornherein über-
sprungen, in dem wir uns unmittelbar heimisch wissen, der Dinge, wie sie uns auch der
Maler zeigt: der einfache Stuhl mit der eben hingelegten oder liegengelassenen Tabakpfeife
bei van Gogh”; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 214).
 Heidegger, What is a Thing, 209 – 211. The contrast Heidegger draws here between color as
wavelength and color as what appears in paintings has a direct parallel in “Origin of the
Work of Art”: “Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by
measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself, only when it remains undisclosed and un-
explained.” Heidegger, Origin of the Work of Art, 45 (“Die Farbe leuchtet auf und will nur leuch-
ten. Wenn wir sie verständig messend in Schwingungszahlen zerlegen, ist sie fort. Sie zeigt sich
nur, wenn sie unentborgen und unerklärt bleibt”; Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, 33).
 “In fabricating equipment – e. g., an ax – stone is used, and used up. By contrast, the tem-
ple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to

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136 Sam Fleischacker

But all this has close parallels in Horkheimer and Adorno. Their critique of
the identification of nature with what a mathematized physics can measure is
very similar:

Nature, before and after quantum mechanics, is what can be registered mathematically;
even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical
theorems. In the preemptive identification of the thoroughly mathematized world with
truth, enlightenment believes itself safe from the return of the mythical. It equates thought
with mathematics. […] The reduction of thought to a mathematical apparatus [mathemati-
sche Apparatur] condemns the world to be its own measure.⁶⁴

There is even a verbal echo here: compare Horkheimer/Adorno’s “mathematical

apparatus [mathematische Apparatur]” with the “measuring apparatus [Meßap-
paratur]” in the first quotation from Heidegger above. The argument is in any
case identical. Both texts suggest that nature seems best approached mathemati-
cally because we come to it with the assumption (“presupposition”, “preemptive
identification”) that it must be mathematically organized, that the great success
of mathematized science is not a discovery but a tautology: something built into
what we are willing to count as responsible thought.
And, just like Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno point to art as the main
alternative to this scientism. “With advancing enlightenment, only authentic
works of art have been able to avoid the mere imitation of what […] is”, they
say.⁶⁵ Art at least can be separate from science, can constitute a sphere that

come forth for the first time […]. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; met-
als come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing […]. To be sure, the sculptor uses
stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up.”; Heidegger, Origin of
the Work of Art, 44– 46 (“Der Stein wird in der Anfertigung des Zeuges, z. B. der Axt, gebraucht
und verbraucht. Er verschwindet in der Dienstlichkeit. […] Das Tempel-Werk dagegen lässt,
indem es seine Welt aufstellt, den Stoff nicht verschwinden, sondern allererst hervorkommen
und zwar im Offenen der Welt des Werkes: der Fels kommt zum Tragen und Ruhen und wird
so erst Fels; die Metalle kommen zum Blitzen und Schimmern, die Farben zum Leuchten, der
Ton zum Klingen […]. Zwar gebraucht der Bildhauer den Stein so, wie nach seiner Art auch
der Maurer mit ihm umgeht. Aber er verbraucht den Stein nicht”; Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks,
32– 34).
 DE 18, 20/DA 47, 49: “Natur ist, vor und nach der Quantentheorie, das mathematisch zu Er-
fassende; selbst was nicht eingeht, Unauflöslichkeit und Irrationalität, wird von mathemati-
schen Theoremen umstellt. In der vorwegnehmenden Identifikation der zu Ende gedachten
mathematisierten Welt mit der Wahrheit meint Aufklärung vor der Rückkehr des Mythischen
sicher zu sein. Sie setzt Denken und Mathematik in eins. […] In der Reduktion des Denkens
auf mathematische Apparatur ist die Sanktion der Welt als ihres eigenen Maßes beschlossen.”
 DE 13/DA 40: “Mit fortschreitender Aufklärung haben es nur die authentischen Kunstwerke
vermocht, der bloßen Imitation dessen, was ohnehin schon ist, sich zu entziehen.”

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 137

doesn’t aim at knowledge⁶⁶, at grasping things. Like Heidegger in the Origin of

the Work of Art, they see art as a sphere in which we can step back from our at-
tempts at mastering everything, and allow things to address us directly: allow
ourselves to apprehend things “as they are”. Rather than talking about this ap-
prehension of things as a mode of grasping Being, they prefer to talk about the
recognition of nature. But they commend a similar kind of humility: “In the mas-
tery of nature, without which mind does not exist, enslavement to nature per-
sists. By modestly confessing itself to be power and thus being taken back into
nature, mind rids itself of the very claim to mastery which had enslaved it to na-
ture.”⁶⁷
This, I take it, is the move that would enable Enlightenment to “master it-
self” and thus “break through the limits of enlightenment”.⁶⁸ The paradox of
a truly liberating, humanistic enlightenment is that it can come about only if
we master precisely our tendency to mastery, if we overcome our tendency to
want to know everything, to fit everything into the classificatory structures of
reason, and instead recognize the need to submit our minds to a world outside
of them.
Among other things, this submission to nature would entail accepting natu-
ral emotions like respect and reciprocal love for what they are: starting points for
morality that cannot be further reduced to reason. The authors say, in Kantian
vein, that reason “unmasks substantial goals as asserting the power of nature
over mind” – as “curtailing [reason’s] own self-legislation” – but add that reason
thereby “puts itself at the service of every natural interest”.⁶⁹ They suggest, that
is, that the very attempt of reason to divorce itself from nature leads it, paradoxi-
cally, to enslave itself to nature. If reason were only to allow nature to set it some
goals – via (some of?) our natural feelings or “affects” – if it could allow itself to
be “taken back into nature,” it seems that it could, again paradoxically, over-
come its subservience to “every natural interest”. A reason that recognized
these limits to itself would it seems be a truly liberating reason. I think that is
what Horkheimer and Adorno retain as their hope for the future; I also think

 DE 14, 25/ DA 41, 56.

 DE 31/DA 62: “Naturverfallenheit besteht in der Naturbeherrschung, ohne die Geist nicht exi-
stiert. Durch die Bescheidung, in der dieser als Herrschaft sich bekennt und in Natur zurück-
nimmt, zergeht ihm der herrschaftliche Anspruch, der ihn gerade der Natur versklavt.”
 DE 171/DA 238; see n. 7.
 DE 68/DA 110: “Da sie inhaltliche Ziele als Macht der Natur über den Geist, als Beeinträch-
tigung ihrer Selbstgesetzgebung entlarvt, steht sie, formal wie sie ist, jedem natürlichen Inter-
esse zur Verfügung.”; see also DE 64/DA 105. And again, in the next sentence: “Becoming simply
an organ, thinking reverts to nature”.

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138 Sam Fleischacker

they believe that their own reasoning throughout Dialektik der Aufklärung, about
the nature of reason as well as about modern society, can help lead us to endorse
this hope. If so, I suggest that they remain very much within the frame of a Kant-
ian approach to the improvement of human life: albeit a Kantian approach that
requires a severe critique of Kant’s own work. It is of course uncanny how closely
the critique they do offer of Kant parallels Heidegger’s; perhaps unsurprisingly,
even if they were aware of this parallel, they do not mention it.⁷⁰ But the parallel
supports my reading of them as eccentric or dissident Kantians. Heidegger took
himself to be doing an immanent critique of Kant,⁷¹ and they are far less anti-ra-
tional, far less given to the mystical, than he was. Their willingness to talk of
“nature” rather than “Being” is a symptom of that, and they also avoid his ten-
dency, especially in his later work, to dismiss reasoning altogether in favor of
some more primeval, pre-philosophical encounter with Being. They seem in
these ways to be more Kantian than Heidegger. It is in any case a mistake to over-
look the degree to which they, like Heidegger, emerge from the thickly neo-Kant-
ian context of early 20th-century German thought, and are always working out
from within that context.

4
The third and final ‘optimistic’ hint I see in Dialektik is one that simply affirms
the liberating power of honest, thorough-going critique, of the kind that the book
itself represents. This is a theme that unsurprisingly goes together with a certain
amount of open praise for Kant; intriguingly, it is also tied up with an admiration
that the authors express for Judaism (almost certainly something that comes
from Horkheimer more than Adorno). Indeed, in this respect, the book links
Kantianism to Judaism. At one point, the authors explicitly associate the two:
“Neither Moses nor Kant proclaimed emotion,” they say; “their icy law knew nei-

 Instead they cite Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences as a source for their critique of
mathematization (18 – 19/47). But the Crisis displays Heidegger’s influence in a number of
ways: see David Carr’s comments to his edition of the Crisis, notes to 5, 8, and 12. I suspect
the critique of mathematization is among them.
 “We turn our question […] into Kant’s and […] Kant’s question into ours […]. We put ourselves
within [Kant’s philosophy]”; What is a Thing?, 56 (“Wir machen unsere Frage ‘Was ist ein Ding?’
zu der Frage Kants und umgekehrt die Frage Kants zu der unseren. […] Wir versetzen uns in diese
[Kants Philosophie] selbst.”; Die Frage nach dem Ding, 56). Compare Heidegger, Phenomenolog-
ical Interpretation, 2– 4.

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 139

ther love nor sacrificial pyres.”⁷² Just before this, they had associated Judaism’s
attack on idolatry more generally with enlightenment, describing “Jewish mono-
theism” as having issued a “ban on mythology,” and calling enlightenment “that
monotheism’s secularized form.” Further down, it seems that “the doctrine of the
crucified Christ” was “alien” to both Judaism and the Enlightenment – Kant’s en-
lightenment, in particular – and that they were right to resist it: the Christian
doctrine “sought prematurely” to reconcile civilization with nature. Later, we
get an account of Judaism that implicitly associates it with Kant. Judaism’s
God, we are told, leads us to “the concept of the absolute self [Begriff des abso-
luten Selbst] […] [which] subjugates nature” and “offers [us] liberation from it.”⁷³
In the “pitiless statement, ‘I am […],’ that tolerates nothing besides itself” – re-
member, Kant is also portrayed as “pitiless” – the Jewish God “surpasses […] the
blinder and therefore more ambiguous judgment of anonymous fate.” Once
again, this Kantian Judaism is arrayed against Christianity, which claims to re-
present “progress beyond Judaism [Fortschritt über das Judentum]” but really
“produce[s] idolatry”, “fraudulently” claiming to offer a spiritual reconciliation
between the natural and the supernatural while really “aspiring to power.”⁷⁴
Christians also think that they have demonstrated their spiritual conclusions –
proved them, given them firm rational foundations – and have to “forget” the
faith on which they really rely. Horkheimer and Adorno exempt Pascal, Lessing,
Kierkegaard and Barth from this critique – “the paradoxical Christians, the anti-
official thinkers”⁷⁵ – describing them as radical, tolerant, and honest. But this
reversion to faith and paradox, to not being sure of what to believe, is again pre-
sented as something Jewish. What is best in Christianity, say Horkheimer and
Adorno, is “the Jewish and negative moment” in it, which challenges its mythical
elements and aspirations to social power: by way of this moment, “magic and
finally the church itself are relativized”.⁷⁶
Now it might seem at first as if Judaism and Kant share precisely what Hork-
heimer and Adorno dislike about enlightenment – iciness, and an opposition to

 DE 89 – 90/DA 137– 138: “Moses und Kant haben nicht das Gefühl verkündigt, ihr kaltes Ge-
setz kennt weder Liebe noch Scheiterhaufen.”
 DE 145/DA 207.
 DE 145/DA 207– 208. See also DE 146/DA 208: “Therein lies its untruth: in the fraudulently
affirmative interpretation of self-forgetting.” / “Darin liegt ihre Unwahrheit: in der trügerisch af-
firmativen Sinngebung des Selbstvergessens.”
 DE 147/DA 209.
 DE 146/DA 208: “Die Unverbindlichkeit des geistlichen Heilsversprechens, dieses jüdische
und negative Moment in der christlichen Doktrin, durch das Magie und schließlich noch die Kir-
che relativiert ist, wird vom naiven Gläubigen im stillen fortgewiesen, ihm wird das Christentum,
der Supranaturalismus, zum magischen Ritual, zur Naturreligion.”

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140 Sam Fleischacker

nature. But in both passages the Jewish and Kantian views are presented as su-
perior to their Christian alternative, which “prematurely” or “fraudulently” re-
presents itself as resolving these problems. Elsewhere, the authors characterize
Judaism as a worldview that, unlike enlightenment, has successfully conquered
myth.⁷⁷ They also describe it as resolutely opposed to falsehood, and as offering
a method of “negating” idols that – unlike both Buddhism and Hegelian dialec-
tic – does not turn negation itself into an absolute.⁷⁸ There are also places in
which they defend the Kantian themes that they identify with Judaism. They
pay tribute to the importance of a freedom that transcends nature, like the Jew-
ish God and the Kantian moral law, criticizing socialism for having embraced a
deterministic outlook.⁷⁹ And they say both that the fascist madness of the world
that they live in is tied to the decline of the Kantian concept of “the human being
as person, as the bearer of reason”⁸⁰, and that that decline is best illustrated by
the fact that the Jew has never yet been properly recognized as a human being.⁸¹
So Horkheimer and Adorno link, and praise, a Jewish and a Kantian critique
of mythology; they also link, and praise, the Jewish and the Kantian commitment
to freedom; and they endorse the Kantian notion of humanity as of supreme
value, and take a recognition of Jews as human to exemplify a commitment to
this value. Meanwhile, Christianity, which might seem to uphold Horkheimer
and Adorno’s proposed return to nature and to sentiment, is criticized as prema-
ture and fraudulent. I suggest that the authors view the return to nature and to
sentiment they recommend as a very difficult project. It is difficult in part be-
cause we moderns are deeply committed to self-mastery and the mastery of na-
ture, however we may try to criticize them, and it is also difficult because our
societies reify instrumental reason, and we cannot readily, as individuals, trans-

 DE 153, 164– 165/DA 216, 229 – 230.

 See DE 17– 18/DA 46: “The Jewish religion brooks no word which might bring solace to the
despair of all mortality. It places all hope in the prohibition of invoking falsity as God, the finite
as the infinite, the lie as truth. The pledge of salvation lies in the rejection of any faith which
claims to depict it […]. Negation, however, is not abstract. The indiscriminate denial of anything
positive, the stereotyped formula of nothingness as used by Buddhism, ignores the ban on call-
ing the absolute by its name no less than its opposite, pantheism […]. [Similarly,] ‘determinate
negation [bestimmte Negation]’ is not exempted from the enticements of its intuition […]. With
the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes
enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulat-
ing the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as
the absolute, he violated the prohibition and himself succumbed to mythology.”
 DE 32– 33/DA 64– 65.
 DE 169/DA 235: “der Mensch als Person, als Träger der Vernunft”.
 DE 165/DA 230.

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 Kant in the Dialectic of Enlightenment 141

form those societies. Christian teachings make overcoming these problems look
too easy. Like many Jewish thinkers before them, Horkheimer and Adorno value
precisely the deferring of redemption characteristic of a Jewish outlook on the
world, the very fact that Jews do not think a Messiah has yet arrived. This defer-
ring of redemption keeps us always aware that any salvation we may be able to
achieve, any way that we may one day find out of our own inhumanity, and dis-
tance from nature, is far off, elusive, hard to attain: certainly not something we
should delude ourselves into thinking we have already achieved. Horkheimer
and Adorno value precisely the stern refusal of easy comfort, the negativity,
the relentless critique that they see in both Judaism and Kant. That is what
keeps us from a “premature” or “fraudulent” hope – keeps us truthful, in our
quest for freedom, keeps us aiming for a true freedom, rather than a simulacrum
of it.
Which is to say: In the midst of all their pessimism, their frustration and re-
vulsion at the fascist, socialist, and liberal societies of their day, Horkheimer and
Adorno continue deeply to value truth and freedom. In that regard, they also
continue to be true friends of Kantian enlightenment, even as they criticize it.

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